Mussolini would have envied Harper's style: John Ralston Saul

Stephen Harper is running Parliament in a manner that fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and Argentinian strongman Juan Perón would admire, says John Ralston Saul in his latest book.

In The Comeback, a book about the social and political progress being made by Canadian aboriginals, Saul says the prime minister’s use of gigantic omnibus bills makes a mockery of democracy.

“This was a direct negation of our democratic system,” Saul writes in reference to two omnibus bills — C-38 and C-45 — which he says amended 133 laws.

“Napoleon would have approved. Mussolini would have been jealous. Perón would have been filled with admiration.”

Saul is one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals, president of PEN International and the spouse of former governor-general Adrienne Clarkson. He joins a long list of prominent Canadians condemning what they see as Mr. Harper’s contempt for the democratic process.

Saul devotes a chapter of his book to detailing how so-called ‘budget’ bills have been used by the Harper government as camouflage for making controversial changes to law — for example, downgrading environmental protections and changing unemployment insurance eligibility — with very little debate.

The Conservatives have defended the bills by saying that other governments have used them as well. This, says Saul, “is an intentional misrepresentation, which is to say, it is a lie.”

Past governments have built packages of laws, Saul acknowledges, but he argues they tended to be linked by a single theme, were smaller than the Harper government’s omnibus bills and were subjected to more debate. The Harper bills are designed, he says, to short-circuit public debate: “The democratic function is eliminated as a reality. What remains is pro-forma voting.”

In an address to an audience of 700 in Ottawa Monday night, Saul repeated his comparisons to dictators of the past. His book hits hard at the Conservative government on its management of aboriginal affairs and environmental policy.

Saul laments the fact that there has not been a louder outcry against the use of omnibus bills, and accuses the academic community of abandoning its duty to comment on politics. Perhaps, he writes, “most of them have simply lost the habit of intervening in public, as if it were beneath their dignity.”

If so, he adds, this is “betraying the central purpose of their tenure, which exists for the precise purpose of giving them the independence to intervene publicly without the risk of being fired.”